Allan Mallinson observes a decade of changes to training on Salisbury Plain

Exercise Pashtun Dawn, the generic name for the pre-deployment training on Salisbury Plain for the bi-annual turnover of British troops in Task Force Helmand, has just begun.

Operation Herrick 18 will be one of the last, all Nato combat troops being due to leave Afghanistan by the end of next year. We may therefore not see a Herrick 21, certainly not in the current strength: 1st Mechanized Brigade, the core of Herrick 18, is some 8,000 strong. The “drawdown” plans will mean that the brigade furnishing Herrick 19 will be half this figure by the end of December (5,200 servicemen